781–790 of 1001 posts
Also worth noting the obvious, this math isn't required in the industry but is used heavily in interviewing.
Source: am a dropout. Learning math was the hard part; coding and infra are the fun part.
I think this tells you a lot about the "continued adolescence" theory.
Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…
I disagree. Schools were founded on the principle that the best and brightest minds will teach the new generation (this goes all the way back to Athens). If you separate the researchers into a "research university" and the other students into "trade schools" eventually you'll just make the class divide all that much worse because the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedag…
IMO we don't really need the best and brightest minds to teach undergraduate level classes, most of the contents are not really that cutting edge and can probably be standardized. We want to best minds to teach, but I think they should teach research students rather than large classes.
> the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedagogy than the subject, or who themselves are not as qualified.
Sounds better than lower tier schools attracting teachers who are not interested in teaching at all... The current system mainly considers research output, so schools trying to increase their competitiveness will push the professors to spend more time on research and less time on teaching. Teachers who are very qualified in teaching might not be able to spend much time in teaching at all.
In Germany you study for free. There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer. You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people…
What do you think about German kids being sent to different kinds of highschools at age 10. Most of the people attending Hauptschule don't attend university [0]. In some regions 60% of the children attend it. Aren't you concerned that the person who could discover the cure for cancer is in Hauptschule right now? Imagine a Germany in which the rest of your life isn't determined at age ten. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.o…
What you imply here is entierly untrue. I know lots of people that made their Abitur after having been to the Haupt- or Realschule first. That is not to say that the school system doesn't have its problems -- it clearly has -- but you are painting a picture that is not rooted in reality.
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> not to be a resource for corporations I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift. Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!
Vomit. Was Tom Swift an self-centered emerald scion who got lucky with money and poured it into his pet projects? News to me. Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do…
Got any evidence of this beyond what his estranged father said?
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That's real problem Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+ and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one…
People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up. Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers. Some of the trades pay very, very, well. Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k. I know a woman running…
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> I would question if Altman is good at anything He leads OpenAI > Find the smartest and most driven 18 year olds in the world, and give them 'tenure'--say a decade+ of salary, resources to work on whatever they want, and a smart peer group--in exchange for small % of future earnings. Why do you think this is a bad idea?
> He leads OpenAI And OpenAI has strayed away from their initial "vision" considerably. > Why do you think this is a bad idea? Because it's a very libertarian and capitalistic view of how life and society should work. It's very one dimensional. 18-year-olds should not be put in an environment where their goal is to make money for a sicko in Silicon Valley who then takes a percentage of their future earnings. 18-year-…
Why that bad? Is a very socialist or communist view on life better?
Seems like a bias rather than factually supported.
Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…
> teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs From Indian perspective I see this part broken big time as well. It takes 4 years to graduate with an engineering degree where as the core content could very well be taught well under 2 years. The first year is common across all streams; so one is taught workshop/welding, workings of ICE and what not. 3rd semester the specialisation topics are gingerly introduced wi…
Librarian? Scientist? Firefighter? Cowboy? Shoes? Radiologist? College might be the way ... or the worst possible choice. Depends on you.
Makes no sense to invest a lot of time and $$$ without exposure to all of your options. Or to stick with something you don't like, when there are 1000 other things. Right now ... where do you turn to find out about them? It's crickets out there.
I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as so…
I think the piece that you are missing is automation. A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated and likely will be automated in the coming decades. If you are college age, you should be planning for a more automated future.
Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time.
There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.